Marina Shults
Saint Petersburg State University, Russia
The memorialization of the history of the struggle with French invasion of Russia carried out by the emperor Nicholas I and its role in the formation of state ideology is only fragmentarily studied by Russian scholars. The research focuses on two predominant subjects. The first one is a reconstruction of the creation of “A Description of French Invasion of Russia in 1812” (first edition: St. Petersburg, 1839) by the court historian A. I. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky and exploration of his interactions with his royal customer. As a rule, this large-scale project is studied in isolation from other activities undertaken by Nicholas I in this direction. The other subject of interest is the creation of the “visual history” of the Patriotic War of 1812 represented in 12 large-format paintings of major battles commissioned by the emperor to a Bavarian artist Peter von Hess. The process of creating the series is brilliantly reconstructed by Russian scholars.
Based on archival sources and studies of our predecessors, we managed to establish the fact of a direct involvement of the court historian A. I. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky in the working process of the artist P. Hess whose series of paintings was aimed for special “memorial room” of military history of Russia in the Winter Palace. By focusing on a micro-history of this artistic commission, we were able to compare the censorship edits that were made in the text personally by the emperor and visual interpretation of the history of war. This allowed us to highlight the priorities in Nicholas’ vision of the military history of Russia and to point out his “corrections” in the history of the war. In particular, a notable change in understanding the role of certain commanders and “common people” in the Patriotic war, which was initiated in the works of A. I. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, then was fully expressed in the article by F. Bulgarin and further developed in the visual series by P. von Hess.
This allows us to deeply analyze the process of rethinking and “rewriting” of Russian national history by Nicholas I.